This post was improperly placed, probably by my own fault, it wound up above, where TB responded to it. I thought Wiki had lost it so I rewrote it from memory, not realizing it's a near duplicate of a previous post of mine. I will leave it here unedited, in the interest of completeness. No, I am not going crazy.

You didn't pay for your tuition. You went to a State school, that $3000 did not pay for the cost of your education, the difference was made up by the taxpayers, many of whom did not have the benefit of a college education. Your tuition was just the price of admission. It's what kept out the riff-raff.

Even in a private school, there are government research grants, scholarships, assistantships, fellowhips, and similar funding from private, corporate and institutional sources. Again, these are resources that are available to those who get in, but are denied to those who cannot. The society pays for those resources, its not part of the tuition.

Tuition is just the cover charge that gets you in the door. Dinner, drinks, and the show are on the community at large. It is a subsidy, a transfer of wealth, to the middle and upper class who can afford that tuition. All your graph shows is that the subsidy is shrinking, and the middle class is getting squeezed out. Now, if they want to go, they have to borrow to do it. Well, no one's putting a gun to their heads, right?

It may be a valid point of discussion whether or not we can afford as a society to subsidize our students any more, but to say that those who can afford a nominal tuition are "paying for their education", and those who can't "don't deserve to get one" is just a lie. Its just part of the huge lie that those who have more, routinely inflict on those who have less.